This artwork is compelling and it confuses me. I like crossword puzzles, cryptograms, brainteasers in general, etymology, and games of language manipulation. It seems obvious that playing with language is a significant part of Bruce Nauman’s artistic practice. Our Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman recently wrote:

In addition to provoking viewers to consider the aesthetic dimensions of a format associated with advertising, Nauman called attention to the idea that visual art can be a means for exploring language.

It’s easy enough to grasp the progression (spelling and rhyming) of the words in the title. How did he come to those particular words though? Which one came first? Or was it just an immediate kind of thing where the words mentally landed one after the next? I’ve wondered if you’re intended to think of the sad cliché of violins playing? It’s easy then to think of something that might really be sad. VIOLENCE and SILENCE together = what? It could be death. Is the word SILENCE intended to get you to think about the silent nature of the neon itself, flashing in the dark? Or is SILENCE to make you think about VIOLENCE being under-reported or ignored? Could it just be that Nauman heard a great piece of violin music that had a violent crescendo and then got really quiet? Or, maybe the cadence of the words has a natural incline and decline as you think them or say them. But I doubt it’s that simple.

What about the colors? The sequence of words goes like this: and then the same words, only completely backwards:

Do the specific individual colors or their transitions make you feel the ideas of the words differently? I think they must. I’m not sure it’s fair to say it, but maybe Nauman assigned the specific colors to each word for a specific conceptual reason, manipulating the gases as if using physics to harness synesthetics. Nauman studied mathematics and physics in college, so I assume his use of the noble gases is pretty well-informed. The sequencing of the words, too, is another aspect entirely that is mathematically specific.

When I moved here in 1989 as a young art student, I first saw this piece and was absolutely astounded by it. I hadn’t seen any of Nauman’s work before then, and it introduced to a whole new genre of artwork. Everything I’ve seen of his since has moved me.

Now that I’ve lived here for 25 years, the way I experience this work is slightly different. I think it’s because it’s located in Baltimore. It’s not pleasant to admit that Baltimore has a reputation for violent crime. Maybe any city where it was installed would summon up the same ideas. Yet there is an impact or echo of a city’s identity on a work of public art. Language manipulated in this way is suggestive politically. Figuring out the suggestion is part of the intellectual challenge in looking at Nauman.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

The monument Tiffany Window, Baptism of Christ, has graced the entrance to the BMA auditorium since 1982. When the time came to reinstall the piece in the American Wing, the question arose of which side should be shown. There is no correct side to a stained-glass window since it has viewers from both the inside and the outside of the building.

Looking at the window in its original installation, it became clear that the window had been shown from the exterior viewpoint. For instance, it might have struck the viewer that St. John was baptizing Jesus with his left hand, whereas in a church one might expect to see him pouring with his right hand. All the supporting rods were at the back of the piece, whereas it is traditional in a church for the stained-glass windows to have the supporting rods on the interior. Further investigation showed that the original cartoon by the artist Frank Brangwyn, which Tiffany used for the stained-glass design, has St. John pouring the water on Jesus’ head using his right hand. The decision was made by Dr. David Park Curry, Senior Curator and Dept. Head of Decorative Arts, American Painting & Sculpture, to show the Tiffany window from the other side in the reinstallation of the American Wing. Thus began one of the toughest installation challenges in the museum to date.

The piece had been completely restored in 1979 by a New York City stained-glass specialist and separated into four panels for easier handling. In the thirty years following, a few conservation issues developed, such as a brass supporting rod on an upper panel, which had separated from the frame at one end. Fortunately, we had the expertise of Tage Jakobsen of Artisan Glass Works, Inc., Baltimore, who carried out various metal repairs and gave advice on the display aspects of the piece. We were also fortunate to have local mount maker and sculptor Paul Daniel to help fabricate new supports for the window. Under the direction of Dave Verchomin, Installation Manager, the BMA installation team and an army of contract art handlers deinstalled the window and placed it in storage to await stabilization and cleaning.

The first piece I treated was the smallest, and located at the base of the window. You can see the exterior side and the interior side below.

Exterior view of the glass.

Interior view of the glass.

Much to my delight there was a painted Tiffany signature stamp on the bottom right hand corner of the interior view that had some old repairs and was covered in surface grime – further evidence that this was indeed the interior side.

A painted Tiffany signature stamp on the bottom right hand corner of the interior view.

The BMA Registrars and Installation team carefully move the Tiffany Window.

The treatment of each panel was carried out over a few months, with art handling help from the BMA Registrars and Installation team. After extensive research, a new LED lighting system was selected by Lighting Designer Kel Millionie. After much planning and thought the BMA Installation crew and contract art handler army came together again to reinstall St. John Baptist window in November, 2014, just in time for the opening of the American Wing.

David Zimmerman adjusting the mount before the second panel is installed.

Testing of the LED panels in the bottom right corner

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

Years ago I lived in Charles Village, so I was just a walk away from great art to take me all over the world. I love to wander through museums, letting the art grab me. Vallotton grabbed me.

I loved the way these figures wrapped up around each other; how their bodies were human, but also liquid. They melted into each other and the room. And the title ­– The Lie – that’s a good title.

There is also that red. Vallotton brings this woman to the forefront with her red dress, but the table, and the chair all the way in the back, is red too. The woman not only melts into her lover, but the furniture. It’s as though she could be dusted off, folded up, and put away just like the tablecloth.

I love the reflection of red on her face – on both their faces – after too much wine. I love the shape of her fingers on his back. I love the blob of their hands together, the indistinguishable features of a man all in black. I love the wallpaper, and the light spot in the background where the chairs meet. This gold wallpaper gives this scene a time and a place.

When I first saw this painting, I bought a postcard of it in the BMA Shop. I pinned it to a board near my desk at my home, and later at my workshop, and every now and then fell into it again…

During another trip to the museum I went into an exhibition on Edgar Allen Poe. One woodcut in particular seemed to capture the moment of a thought, the direct line to a feeling, in a portrait of Edgar Allen Poe. It was Vallotton again. I would later find out that The Lie, which I love so much, also began as a woodcut, which is in the collection at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. I am drawn to the similarities between The Lie and his woodcuts, where people melt into the background or swirl around like leaves on the sidewalk. We are part of the world, of the sky and the walls, not simply standing out in front of it.

Some years later, when I was studying Puppet Arts at The University of Connecticut, I had an assignment to recreate a landscape painting that would firstly be projected, and must then move. With India Inks and transparencies, I painted Vallotton’s Landscape with Trees. And with a series of blue and orange lighting gels, I could set the painting in motion, completing the sunset Vallotton had started for us. Those colors, too, struck me. He had frozen a sunset, that point in the day when light and color changes every second. Since then, I notice how the color of the sky transforms, how the blues and oranges and pinks warp and melt into each other.

Staring off into the works of Vallotton has changed the way I look at the world. It is that change in me that illustrates one of the many reasons art is important and necessary. As the new year brings new promises for self growth, I invite you to get lost in more art and just see if your perspective doesn’t change.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

Eugène Samuel Grasset (French, 1841‑1917). Drawing for Harper’s Magazine: Christmas. 1889. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The George A. Lucas Collection, purchased with funds from the State of Maryland, Laurence and Stella Bendann Fund, and contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations throughout the Baltimore community, BMA 1996.48.13255

Suse Cairns, Digital Content Manager

It is strange to spend Christmas in a country on the other side of the world. In Australia, where I am from, Christmas means summer. It is sweltering hot days, and swimming at the beach. It is sunburn, and stickiness. It is sometimes a roast lunch, but just as often a barbeque outdoors, or a seafood platter. It is not a place where Christmas looks like the movies; like Home Alone or Love Actually, all snow and decorations. Rather, Santa Claus often dons shorts and goes surfing when I see him back in my sunburnt country.

Living in Baltimore, then, is a revelation. Here, December brings cool weather, and the possibility of snow. The lights of 34th Streetin Hampden sparkle. The streets look and feel like every fictional Christmas scene I’ve ever imagined. It is like living in a dream.

Until I moved here to work at the BMA in May, I didn’t realize just how much my ideas and images of the world had come from America; from the films and fictions made here, from the artists, whose work I had grown up with, but rarely seen in the flesh before now. My ideas about what Christmas “should” look like are all grounded in America. I have friends who write from home, asking whether the streets and houses really are as decorated with lights and decorations as they always were in the media. And, of course, the answer is yes.

I find inspiration inDrawing for Harper’s Magazine: Christmasby Eugène Samuel Grasset for two main reasons. The first is that the image itself is beautiful in its simplicity, and its detail. The second is that it reminds me yet again of how close to the center of the world I moved when I came to Baltimore. Harper’s Magazineis“the oldest general-interest monthly in America,”dating back to 1850. So many important and influential writers have graced its pages; writers like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Mark Twain. These are the people who have written books that shape the way we see the world – even in Australia.

The artists in the BMA’s collection, too, are those whose influence has traveledincredibly far. To be in a museum with the largest collection of Matisse’s in the world is humbling.

This Christmas will be unlike any I have ever experienced. No one will be out in the yard batting a cricket ball around. There won’t be kangaroos hopping through the paddocks. But I don’t think things will be too unfamiliar… I’ve grown up imagining a wintery American Christmas as long as I can remember.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

In 1976, American artist Joan Jonas created the 11-minute video work titled “Good Night Good Morning”. In this piece, Bianca Biberaj, Contemporary Curatorial Intern, and Kristen Hileman, Curator & Dept. Head of Contemporary Art, discuss Jonas’ piece, her relationship with the viewer and the camera, and the concepts behind the piece.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

One of the things I love about the BMA’s renovated American wing is the way stories just jump off the walls at you. You don’t have to know anything about the art to start making connections and weaving your own narratives among the paintings, sculpture, and objects that are often juxtaposed in surprising and even provocative ways.

The pristine white marble sculptures in the Maryland Gallery are no exception, but that doesn’t mean these statues are easy to decode. What are we to make of the silent female figures who share our space – one clothed, one nude – both by native son, William Henry Rinehart (1825-1874)? Neoclassical sculpture has always puzzled me, and no less so now after I spent many years writing a doctoral dissertation on it. It seems to want to imitate ancient Greek and Roman art but never quite manages to look Classical, no matter how skilled the sculptor and his or her studio. Modernists considered much of this “Victorian” art cloying and clichéd, so advocated de-accessioning it or at least burying it in museum storage to make room for more contemporary work in 20th century galleries. Some of it looks almost prurient, and indeed 19th century audiences had strict rules about what made a nude “art” versus pornography: if it was carved in white Carrara marble, it represented a Classical ideal, so would elevate the minds of its audiences; tinted to look like human flesh, it was debased.

But rules are made to be broken, and as British sculptor, John Gibson (1790-1866), pointed out, the ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues as well as their buildings: generally ancient sculptures are only monochrome today because the color has worn off with time. Nonetheless Gibson’s Tinted Venuscaused a scandal when first exhibited at the London International Exhibition in 1862. For the leading London literary magazine of the day, the Athenaeum, the figure was no more than “a naked impudent English woman,” its color a vulgar stain on the purity of the white marble “to destroy all alluring power, and every sign of the goddess.” Sculptors’ fascination with the ancient practice of painting statues has continued to the present day; Italian artist, Francesco Vezzoli, has also researched and ancient sculpture painting techniques and re-painted a number of Classical heads in the exhibition, Teatro Romano, at PS1 in New York.

Rinehart, who had studied at MICA before immersing himself in the Classical tradition in Rome with the support of his patron, William T. Walters, did not push the boundaries of the acceptable so far. An accomplished stone mason (some are surprised to learn that many sculptors, then and now, did not do their own carving), Rinehart made sculptures of Classical subjects and contemporary dignitaries, as well as decorative bas-reliefs. His mythic heroines at the BMA, Clytie and Atalanta, are a study in opposites: one nude, one clothed; one rooted to the spot for her love, the other fleeing from it, literally.

Clytie was a water nymph who loved and was abandoned by Apollo, the sun god. She spent so long looking after him longingly as he passed through the sky overhead that she turned into a sunflower, always seeking the sun. In Rinehart’s sculpture, she has not yet transformed into a flower but the sunflower she is holding bows its head, echoing her sadness.

Atalanta had quite another spirit. She was raised by a she-bear after her father, who wanted a son instead, abandoned her on a mountaintop. Once she became a celebrity for her hunting prowess and participation in Jason’s crew as the only female Argonaut, her father decided to step into her life again to insist she get married. As cunning as she was fleet of foot, she agreed to marry only the man who could out run her. With the trickery of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, one of her old hunting companions managed to win the race and her hand. But Aphrodite is a fickle mistress: she got annoyed with the couple for not paying her proper respect, so caused them to be seized with an uncontrollable passion just when they were passing a temple of Zeus. The angry god cursed them for defiling his house with sexual intercourse by turning them into lions. The ancient Greeks thought that lions couldn’t mate with other lions, so this was effectively a condemnation to a chaste marriage.

When I look at Atalanta now I admire Rinehart’s “wet drapery” technique and use of the figure’s hand gestures to convey movement and – is that surprise that she has been bested for the first time? But I also like to imagine that there is another statue of Atalanta just outside the museum: which one of those lions do you think she might be?

Adoph A. Weinman. Lion. c. 1929

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it… Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation. A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers, or a geological epoch may even arrive when all animate life upon the earth ceases; but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration.
Sigmund Freud, On Transience, 1915

Sigmund Freud’s On Transience, written during wartime, and translated in the excerpt above by James Strachey, asks us to consider whether the transience of any object of beauty – be it an art object, a season, or human beauty – makes it less valuable; whether the fleeting nature of summer or an aging face destroys the worth of its beauty. Is something less precious if it is only short-lived?

It is an interesting question to ask when visiting an art museum, where through care and conservation the changes that time brings are slowed down or arrested, in order to allow generations to come to appreciate and study the objects. As institutions that enable cultural perpetuation, museums hold onto objects of great beauty and great significance, many of which are hundreds or even thousands of years old. Such objects gain value from the many meanings and lives and interpretations they’ve had. In museums, time slows down and collapses upon itself.

Perhaps because of this, one object that gives me pause every time I see it is Zoe Leonard’s Untitled, 1999-2000, located in the BMA’s Contemporary Wing. The piece, which Helene Grabow spoke about previously, is made up of seven fruit skins that, after the artist consumed their flesh, were sewn back into their original shapes. The peels now slowly decompose. It is impossible to know how long they will last, or whether the piece will look the same or be changed the next time you visit it.

I love this work of art, because it makes no pretence at permanence. Instead, Leonard has captured something vital; the notion that every moment is precious, even those that are challenging, precisely because they are fleeting. As the old saying goes, it is impossible to stand in the same river twice. I have rarely found an artwork that makes me so aware of the changing nature of time and life as this one.

Freud argues that transience increases the value of beauty, because such beauty becomes imbued with a scarcity value as well, and I think that’s true of Leonard’s work. While some works of art can seem unchanging each time you visit them, perhaps leading to a certain complacency – a sense that there is no urgency to again see a piece of art you once saw and loved, because it will be the same next time – the knowledge that Leonard’s work is going to change increases the attention I pay to it, and the frequency with which I visit it. Each time I look at it, I know that it is my only chance to experience the piece exactly as it is at that moment.

Of course, that is true of all art. The experience of seeing a work of art is always different, because even when it hasn’t changed, you have.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

While preparing paintings for the BMA’s newly installed American Wing, I’ve come to appreciate some decorative styles in frames in which I hadn’t previously been as interested. I have a great attraction to frames from the 19th and 20th centuries, and frames made by artists, and wood frames from the 17th century in Northern Europe. Honestly, I couldn’t choose a favorite. But the beautifully refined and carved frames for some of our late 18th American portraiture have recently caught my eye, in part because I needed to treat one.

The frame for the portrait of John Hanson by John Hesselius was made c. 1760. The frame seems to be original to the painting, fits it well, and is stylistically contemporary. Prior to installing the framed work in the gallery, both the painting and its frame needed some attention. As I focus on frames primarily, that’s what I will talk about.

The frame had not been examined until recently, and it was discovered that its surface was covered with a layer of soot and grime. There were splits near the site edge of the frame at the mitres, and numerous missing pieces of ornament and losses to the gilding.

Before treatment photograph of the frame.

Gilding is usually topped with shellacs and tonal coatings that over time can be difficult to clean, as the dirt becomes imbedded. It’s a careful task to undertake: gold leaf is very sensitive to many solvents and also to excessive rubbing or handling. The entire frame is carved wood that’s been gilded (more than once). There are no composition ornaments which have been sculpted separately and then added on. The workmanship in the carving of the frames of this period is exquisite, with moments of angularity. This frame is actually quite delicate. There are pierce-carved center and corner cartouche ornaments with leaves. The swept top edge of the profile consists of a gentle serpentine ribbon which is burnished and water-gilded, and terminates in c-scrolls at center ornaments. The rest of the gilding scheme is matte. The site edge of the frame exhibits a gadroon pattern, which radiates directionally from the centers of the rails, drawing the viewer’s eye into the picture plane. There are three large leaves which adorn the center ornaments as well, splayed out in symmetrical fashion. The quiet areas of the profile are adorned with gentle and delicate garlands of small leaves and flowers. Another beautiful feature is the way that the pierced carved negative voids echo the oval format of the portrait on its rectangular ground.

It is a very fine example of mid to late 18th-century American frames, which closely resemble their contemporary English counterparts. Sometimes they are called American Rococo. I have seen these frames referred to as George III (although in this case, that appellation would NOT have gone over well, situated on the portrait of John Hanson. In 1781,John Hanson of Charles County of Maryland became the first President of the United States in Congress Assembled, under the Articles of Confederation and was a great patriot. Part of Maryland’s Route 50 is even named for him.)

The treatment performed consisted of dusting, consolidation of gilding, structural repairs, loss compensations and ornament casting and replication, gesso recutting, in addition to surface cleaning and ingilding.

I finished this frame with no time to spare before it needed to be installed.

After treatment photograph of the frame.

The framed painting is now hanging in “Salon style” in the newly installed Dorothy McIlvain Scott American Wing, in Gallery 8, along with a large group of portraits in the BMA’s collection.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

This is the final of four explorations into Henri Matisse’s “The Yellow Dress” by Jay Fisher, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs. In this piece, we consider the collector. How did The Yellow Dress come to Baltimore, and become part of the BMA’s collection? And what does that tell us about Matisse?

Review the previous videos in this series: In part one, we find out more about Matisse’s process, and discover how this dress relates to his history and life. In part two, we see some of the studies for the painting, and learn more about other related works. Part three shows us two paintings that followed The Yellow Dress, to see how Matisse’s work developed after this important piece.

BMA Voices is an insider’s exploration of The Baltimore Museum of Art collection through the eyes of its curators, conservators, and registrars. Featuring a new object every day during the BMA’s 100 Day Celebration, the project will highlight some favorite, amusing, unusual, and obscure objects.

Reproduction, including downloading of Henri Matisse works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.